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More on Writing In thinking about writing and why I write, the following quote from Gloria Steinem sticks

with me. I found it reprinted in John R. Trimble’s Writing with Style, which I confess to not having read enough. For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: 1) when I’m doing it, I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead; 2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, once in a while, pride; and 3) it’s frightening. –Gloria Steinem It’s the first of these three conditions that strikes me most, because feeling this way—as if I have complete certainty in the way I’m spending my time—for me is quite unique. Yesterday I made it a point to write in the middle of a busy day. I stopped at a local café, warmed up with a journal entry, and dove into the opening of a new piece of long fiction that I’ve had in mind for some time. I dove in without an outline, without a complete idea of who my character was or where she was going, even a full sense of what she’d be dealing with. That I started to find these on the page isn’t remarkable. It’s an element of that exploration, of finding one’s story through writing in the same way a reader does, that many of you commented on in reply to this last post (Why I Write). We love the story, uniquely ours, that we find through this practice. What I found remarkable about yesterday was what happened after I wrote: I started looking at the clock. At 2PM, I had to be somewhere. That left me enough time to do X and Y, which I did, then pushed up against the clock a bit and became anxious. From my errands I went home and read for a while, a right I’d earned, I thought, with my writing. I had an engagement for dinner, but all through the afternoon and the night, something was stuck in my mind’s craw, an idea that I wasn’t done at my desk, that I needed to write more. I’m not sure where this came from. By any account, I’d acquitted myself well in the day’s work and broken through 700 words of new material. This was a noble and impressive amount, I thought. But I didn’t feel right. What should I have done with this energy? Usually I try to stow it away for the next day, use its nerves to get me up early to the desk in the morning. But this time I listened. I went back to the desk late last night. The darkness outside my window was broken only by a few lights on the tops of houses. I wrote and added more to the day’s journal. Then I went back to my

fiction and added another 300 words to my first chapter, breaking through 1,000 words for the day. I once read that Shirley Jackson broke out of a longtime emotional slump by writing 1,000 words a day for a year or more. This number has since stuck with me as a reasonable goal for a day. I crossed that boundary and signed off. In the remaining time before bed, my mind was quiet, the anxiety of before entirely gone. It’s the same quiet I feel now, today at the desk as I write this. The sense that Steinem talks about in her first test. Indeed, accomplishment and pride can be fleeting. Writing being “frightening” is a rush, but true on more levels that I can touch on here. It’s her first “test”, that “when I’m doing it [writing], I don’t feel that I should be doing something else instead” that stuck with me even after I’d worked again at night. It was this sense that I’d lacked during the rest of my day, the name for my disquiet. So I see this: the desire for mental quiet and a lack of nagging, as what some would call satisfaction. This brought me back to the desk to write again.

Seth Harwood has written two novels, Jack Wakes Up and Young Junius. A third, This Is Life, will be available in October. For more of his writing, thoughts on publication and free stories as well as free audio downloads of his work, visit sethharwood.com

Why Write? (Part II)

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More thoughts on the daily practice of writing. Thanks to everyone who read and readcast the last one, "Why I Write?"
I hope you find this one helpful as well. As always, thanks so much for your co...

More thoughts on the daily practice of writing. Thanks to everyone who read and readcast the last one, "Why I Write?"I hope you find this one helpful as well. As always, thanks so much for your comments!